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Month: February 2014

The camera flies in around The Pylon and zooms in on a small bungalow beneath the pylon. There is a trickle of smoke coming out of the chimney, the back garden is flooded, and a bony, sick-looking horse stands in the field behind the garden, with water up to its knees.

The camera pans back to the front door of the bungalow, which is banging in the screaming wind. The camera zooms through the door, and alights on a harassed looking man who is peering slit-eyed at his computer screen.

The man is gaunt, even painfully thin, his clothes are worn, and he wears dirty stubble on his chin. The viewer can hear, but not see, what is obviously a young girl with a wracking cough in the background.

The computer screen comes into view, and the viewer can see that the man is reading an article on the Italian Mafia controlling wind farms and raking off the huge profits to be made from subsidies.

Paddy: “Ah Jaysus, the feckn cat is be goin up the pylon again. Would thy come down from there, ye furry fecker ye, I’ve enough on me plate without your shaggin about.”

(Loud knock on the door)

Paddy: “Who would that be? There’s been no visitors here since the pylon was put up, what with the cancer dust flyin’ about.”

Stranger 1: “Mr Pylon?”

Paddy: “Aye, would ye have a cup of tea?

Stranger 2: “We won’t be long, Mr Pylon, we just wanted a word?”

Paddy: “Ah gowaan, big fellas like yees, would ye not have some tea? Aah gowaan. Jeez, look at ye’s dressed to the nines, and its only Friday. Are ye planning on taking the bird for some scoops and Valentine action?

Stranger 1: “Shut yer hole and listen, yer skinny gobshite. Weez is here to deliver a message. Stop with the ‘pylon this’ and the ‘pylon that’ shite. Enough of this whining and ranting on the internet, and phoning people at all hours. You’ve upset some important people with your lies about pylons, and trying to get people to believe that they make you sick. There’s a load of cash to be made here, and you wont be banjaxing nowt, so zip it!”

Paddy: “What cash are youse on about?”

Stranger 2: “You’d be too thick to understand about subsidies and the like, yer dense culchie. It’s big business, and its legit. The stuff you go on about in this house, even when youse with herself in bed, would be enough to drive anyone mental.”

Paddy: “How would you know what’s been said in this house, and on the phone?”

Stranger 2: “Do you not read the news? Sure, we can listen to you scratchin your arse on the jacks. Tis not only the shades that have bugs”.

Paddy: “But Haughey’s dead!”

Stranger 2: (Sneeringly) “We’d be working for people that would make auld Charlie look like a pocket peeler, yer manky clem. Do you remember the likes of Eoin O’Duffy? Now, you’re not deaf? Watch my lips – Shut It, now, or youse might be findin’ that horse’s head in your bed, or maybe your daughter’s bed.”

I know those good folks at http://www.rethinkpylons.org are also putting up a full report on the talk and there is even talk of the whole thing being recorded and put on their website, so go and check it out.

For the past week or so I been havin this nightmare. I’m on the highway and my feet are jammed. Bertie is flying towards me on the Wonderly Wagon with his face covered in talc and lips smeared with tart-red lipstick screaming, “more wind, more wind”. I can’t move and he crashes into me. I’m lying on the tarmacadam feelin like I took a brutal clatter from Godzilla, and I look up to see the little beady eyes on top of the pudge nose and behind the pebble glasses, the triple chin, and the bunny-kins voice with carroty breath saying ‘believe me, believe me’. I wake up shattered, with the sweat comin off me like foam out of a lager tap.

My neighbour, he’s a gas man who collects crystals and reads palms, tells me that the pylon is changing my brain electricity and causing these dreams. He gives me a gorgeous yellow crystal to put under the mattress, and I remember that story as a chiseler and I wonder if the lump in the mattress will keep me awake, same as your wan with that pea. My neighbour also goes to Mass on Sunday, so he might be worth listening to as he has all bases covered.

At the moment there is no wind, it’s lashing fit to bust and theres a small lake at the back from the floods. The Plyon is moaning like a hobo with sore nuts.

This dream has me thinkin about your man Rabbitte for a while now. That’s unhealthy, I hear you say, dreamin about that. What’s more unhealthy than living under a feck’n pylon? How much worse can it get? Paddy, I sez to meself, this might be a message that you can’t be calling your man a langer when he might be doin his best.

I know he’s a politician and a Minister, but he seems to be serious when he says the GridLink has nothing to do with exporting electricity to the Frenchies and the Brits. You’d almost want to believe him. I like to think theres a bit of goodness in every one of us. And he also seems dead serious when he speaks about creating jobs. So I thought I would give Twitchy Nose a fair shake like, and have a proper look. Dreams are messages from beyond. They need to be taken seriously, no messin about, brain electricity or no.

Now, your gonna scream at me for listening to bankers, being the scum of the earth an all, but the World Bank[1] tells us that Ireland reached its highest level of electricity consumption in 2008, but we’ve bin dropping ever since.

This makes sense as 2008 was the height of the Tiger, when everybody was using their credit card like a sixgun and shooting from the hip. The banks were giving us as many silver bullets as we could fire, like there was no tomorrow. We had to fill up our new 8-bedroom houses with all sorts of shite: big screen TVs, game consoles, new electric cookers and other kitchen gadgets, and more laptops than you could take a dump on. Those big houses needed to be lit up like Hugh Hefner’s Bunny Mansion, and all those big screens sucked up the juice as quick as fresh bread in gravy. What you need to remember is that, in that peak year, the grid handled it with ease. Can anybody remember a blackout in 2008? No – cos there were none. So why do we need a billion euro upgrade? Paid for by a loan we can’t afford. Sounds like a recession-recipe to me.

Since then our consumption has dropped every year, and we are now back to 2005 levels, and probably going to drop further.

As their answer to this decreasing domestic consumption, the Government took what we had already and increased by ten times the amount of wind-generated electricity we produced in that peak consumption year of 2008.[2] And they want to double that again.

Now, I might be a thick unemployed blocklayer from Mullingar, but why would ye need to increase our wind-electricity by twenty times (probably more) than the levels that existed at our peak consumption, when we need less electricity, not more? And why would ye want to do it with wind turbines, which make the system jump all over the place, liable to explode faster than Biffo could swallow a can of Harp?

As for jobs. Well, the turbines are bought over from Sweden and Germany, with technicians from those places, not here. They don’t need big crews to maintain them, being made out of galvanised steel. They can even be operated by a computer back in Sweden, they don’t need people at all. Siemens have said they wont be making spare parts here, they will make them at home.

When you think about it, ‘green’ technology produces very few jobs.[3] That’s not its fault, it was never about creating jobs, it was about reducing emissions. But insulating walls and attics, taking gas off slurry pits, even making electric cars, that’s what creates jobs and reduces emissions – a win-win. How about it, Enda, you whose so keen to stop the young ones going away? Do they still make those cars that run off chip oil?

Ye must also remember that because they are paid for by our tax money, the pylons job goes out to tender across the whole of the EU and most of the Western world. Sure, what’s the chance of Paddy in Mullingar getting the job?

When they first put the pylon at the bottom of my patch, I thought I could get a job tightening the nuts and polishing the yoke at Christmas for Santy, maybe as a nixer. Not a hope – your man Sven came twice in the first year, now I never see him. The pylon looks the same as when it was first put in. When the maintenance crew does come one day, I guarantee they’re not from Mullingar. This place will be like ‘The Bridge’ on TV without subtitles.

I copped on soon enough that I would never really understand this pylon pox-up unless I went back to the beginning of the sorry tale.

My reading has taken me back to the early days of the original energy plan. Bertie did the original doodle when he took breaks from reading “ps I love you”. I don’t know if he was smoking back then but the whole thing has a feel to it like it was written on the back of a box of smokes. Noel Dempsey copied it into his colouring book when his mammy allowed him to visit Bertie for a play date. It was called “Delivering a Sustainable Energy Future For Ireland“.

Now I only did a year in Maynooth before I left to lay blocks – me mam was in tears but a mans gotta do what’s needed and my da wasn’t getting any younger – but even I can see that report was ‘tidied up’ by a mad rapper with a crack pipe. Jeannie Mac, it has enough spin to power the GridLink.

The plan was taken up by the Green Party when they whored themselves to the FF and came into Government. Bertie’s plan had called for 33% renewable energy but John Gormley had to show that his dick was bigger than Bertie’s so he took that to 40%. This was when the EU was asking us for 16%. Go figure. The baton was picked up by Eamon Ryan who continued singing loud for the wind farms. Yes, your right, that’s the same Eamon Ryan who is now running so fast in the other direction like he’s got a wind turbine up his arse. Or maybe he’s running for Brussels? And now the latest Minister is running for the wind farms like a rabbitte after a carrot.

This government is very good at blaming everything on the last government. Jesus, Mary and Joseph – do we look like eejits? You’ve had three years to stop the madness that is Grid25, but instead you’re pushing the plan like a streel askin for it.

The EU was telling us that we had to get our renewable energy from three sectors – transport (electric cars); heating (retrofitting: insulating attics and walls) and power generation (creating electricity).

What this government has done is ignore the first two and throw all their eggs into the third basket – electricity generation. And even there they have gone big on one type of electricity generation – the wind farm. They ignored other types of electricity generation like hydro, or collecting the gas from the slurry tank or all sorts of other clever ways– ways that will create jobs at home. Fine Gael and Labour have rather gone with buying wind turbines from the Germans and the Swedes, which can either be operated by one or two people (Germans or Swedes) or can even be operated by a computer in another country (no jobs for anybody).

And all this based on a plan written on the back of a box of smokes seven years ago by a politician who couldn’t change a light bulb. Bertie might have been an energy engineer when it came to buying a round for the lads after a match, but not when it came to deciding this country’s energy policy until 2020. And Noel couldn’t even colour in without going over the lines.

We are used to politicians spouting shite like that Limerick sewer pipe during the floods but at some stage you gotta dig in and say ah come on lads, you’re taking the piss! We might even have a laugh-ana-nudge-ana-wink at the cute hoors. But not with this. This is reckin people’s lives. It is destroying their health. It is breaking up families. It is another reason for the young ones to leave for Oz or the States without looking back.

I realised today that I wouldn’t throw a politician on my fire even if it was the only thing I had to warm my house. The stink would be awful.

You’d be amazed what someone with a bit of time on his hands can find on the internet, while his daughter coughs in her bed, his cat is up the pylon and its brass monkeys outside. I’ve been reading all I can on the Grid 25 project, and before that what was called the NREAP (National Renewable Energy Action Plan). The whole feckin thing was cooked up by politicians for politicians. The ordinary person didn’t get a look-in.

The same goes for EirGrid – it came in under the radar. After Mary O’Rourke was bet black n blue over her handling of the whole electricity mess she quietly cooked up EirGrid by Regulation, instead of putting it before the Oireachtas and the voters. Ordinary feckers like me didn’t have a notion that EirGrid even existed until it was too late. Us poor eejits have only been hearing about Eirgrid in the last coupla years (some people in the last coupla months) but EirGrid was invented back in 2000, whilst those FF gobshites were in power. It was their plan – scribbled down on the back of Bertie’s packet of smokes. The same gobshites who are now jumping up and down pointing fingers at Enda and the Rabbitte. You couldn’t tell em apart, that’s why they wear the coloured ties.

Fianna Fail cooked the whole thing up. Fine Gael and Labour ran with the ball when they saw the money at the end of the rainbow and so doubled the order of wind farms, hoping to sell power to the Brits. The wind farms need 400kV cable to connect to the grid, and 400kV cable needs pylons to hold it up. Now its goin arseways cos the Brits don’t need our electricity and we are paying millions to the private wind farms to switch off at night. So now the hoors are jumping ship like the rats they are as they’re looking at a beating in the elections.

The neck of them thinking they could put pylons across the country. They got so used to talking down to us and telling us what to do. They got away with the Great Bank Robbery. They got away with the less wages and more tax. They got away with the cut in child benefit. They got away with the land tax and the second residence tax when we took on the mortgage for our kids who had no jobs but their own kids to house. They even took away a free visit to the dentist – not that it would affect their shark smiles. But then they got too cute and thought they could build pylons outside our doorsteps – and now theyre caught with their bollix hanging out.

Ireland is now top of the EU hit parade as the most corrupt state in Europe. That’s quite a show when we have the Italians, Spanish and French for our neighbours. Pity it aint Eurovision – we would win the feckin thing again and Marty would have something to talk about.

The system stinks like a County Manager’s piss after a flagon. If the newspaper writers actually want to become journalists again, they might want to take a look at a few things:

Who is on the EirGrid Board and where did they come from and how much are they paid?

How many ex-Ministers and TDs hold positions in EirGrid?

What really happened to the ESB pension monies?

How many FF ex-Ministers and current FG/Labour Ministers own land in the GridLink corridors?

How many Ministers and TDs, both current and ex-, have money in wind farms?

What promises did the current and past governments make to the private wind farm owners? In particular, is there a penalty payment to the owner if the wind farm is not hooked up to the grid?

For example (and this is one tiny example of a stinkin mess), why did the Waterford County Council extend the planning permission on Barrannafaddock Wind Farm seemingly in complete contravention of the conditions attached to the original planning permission?

Who makes Pat Rabbitte’s suits? (that one is my own question – the man is the dog’s bollocks for makin a silk purse out of a sow’s ear – and I need a new suit for my neighbour’s son’s wedding next month).